Suchergebnisse

Ursula King writes an obituary of Raimon Panikkar, 1918-2010.

Science and the Indian Tradition: When Einstein Met Tagore, by David L. Gosling. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. 186 pp., £75. ISBN 0-415-40209-3 (hb), 0-203-96188-9 (ebk).

More than ten years ago, the Club of Rome published its much discussed report The First Global Revolution which stressed that our world possesses a promising opportunity, one unlikely to be provided again, to shape a new understanding and new attitudes towards the world as a whole. Whilst contemporary societies are much confused about morals and ethics, whilst we experience much social, educational, personal and environmental chaos, the Club of Rome report argued that it is essential for humanity to respond to this unique opportunity for a global revolution and find the wisdom needed to deal with it in the right way. But how can we find such wisdom? How can we deal with our personal, social and ecological predicaments? Traditionally, religions have fostered wisdom and morality, have shaped individuals and groups, yet their teachings have shown few outward signs of success because their loftiest ideals have rarely been put fully into practice. For the Club of Rome to appeal to inherited wisdom was a momentous step; it was an appeal to our global religious and philosophical heritage, but also to the task of analysing the powers of spirituality for contemporary society and culture, and to discern the different cultural and historical expressions of spirituality whilst assessing their significance for contemporary ecological thinking and concerns. More recently, the American ecological thinker Thomas Berry, much shaped by his deep knowledge of American native traditions, of eastern religions, and the work of the French thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, also spoke about the need to draw on the resources of wisdom in his seminal book The Great Work. Our Way into the Future. The great work, which is the work of all the people, is "to create a mutually enhancing mode of human dwelling on the planet Earth". Thomas Berry speaks of the need to rediscover the spiritual sense of the universe and the need "to reinvent the human". To create a viable earth community, to develop the new world vision required for building a viable human future, the politics, education and financial arrangements around the globe – or governance, universities and corporations – need fundamental restructuring. This task is impossible to achieve if humankind does not creatively draw on what Berry calls the "four wisdoms": 1. the wisdom of the classical traditions, that is to say the wisdom of traditional religions and philosophies; 2. the wisdom of native peoples; 3. the wisdom of women; 4. the much more recent and newer wisdom of science. This is a profound insight, for we have so far little explored the spiritual resources of science and nature. The convergence of traditional spiritual perspectives of a religious consciousness with some of the spiritual insights that modern science yields is a truly exciting development for human consciousness and community. So how can we relate ecology, spirituality and our global religious heritage?

Buddhist Nuns in Taiwan and Sri Lanka: A Critique of the Feminist Perspective, by Wei-Yi Cheng. London; New York: Routledge, 2007 (Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism). x + 226pp., £80.00. ISBN-10: 0-415-39042-7; ISBN-13: 978-0-415-39042-2 (hb).

General introduction:Gender-critical turns in the study of religion /Ursula King --pt. 1. Theoretical perspectives. Introduction to part I /Tina Beattie --Where have we been? Where do we need to go? Women's studies and gender in religion and feminist theology /Rita M. Gross --Postcolonial and gendered reflections: challenges for religious studies /Morny Joy --Rethinking subjectivity in the gender-oriented study of religions: Kristeva and the 'subject-in-process' /Sîan Hawthorne --On understanding that the struggle for truth is moral and spiritual /Harriet A. Harris --Religious identity and the ethics of representation: the study of religion and gender in the secular academy /Tina Beattie --Raced and gendered perspectives: towards the epidermalization of subjectivity in religious studies theory /Mary Keller --pt. 2. Historical and textual perspectives. Introduction to part II /Tina Beattie --From women's history to feminist theology: gender, witness, and canonicity in the religious narration of the Holocaust /Melissa Raphael --Rethinking religion in gender history: historiographical and methodological reflections /Sue Morgan --The gendering of missionary imperialism: the search for an integrated methodology /Gulnar Eleanor Francis-Dehqani --Gender archaeology and paleochristianity /Diane Treacy-Cole --'Men are from Mars and women are from Venus': on the relationship between religion, gender, and space /Jorunn Økland --Biblical gender strategies: the case of Abraham's masculinity /Deborah F. Sawyer --pt. 3. Cultural and contextual perspectives. Introduction to part III /Tina Beattie --Who are the Muslims? Questions of identity, gender, and culture in research methodologies /Anne Sofie Roald --Reflexive transformations: research comments on me(n), feminist philosophy, and the thealogical imagination /Paul Reid-Bowen --Why difference matters: lesbian and gay perspectives on religion and gender /Sean Gill --Indian Dalit women and the Bible: hermeneutical and methodological reflections /Monica Melanchthon --Race, gender, class, and the theology of empowerment: an Indian perspective /Mukti Barton --An Asian postcolonial and feminist methodology: ethics as a recognition of limits /Sharon A. Bong --Whose face in the mirror? Personal and postcolonial obstacles in researching Africa's contemporary women's theological voices /Carrie Pemberton.